@eurocentric, many thanks for your thoughtful comment. You’re abso right – specialists appear when an ecosystem has grown to a point where the niches are large enough to support their specialised strategy. We may be a long way off that point – what I’d like to do is accelerate the evolution.

I would really, really encourage you to reach out to the NI blogs, if only to continue developing your experiment, just to see what happens, if you have the time. That process is absolutely how I see at least some bridges could be formed. But we can only find out if we try.

There will probably need to be a lot more generalist Euroblogs in order to support more specialised Euroblogs. The generalist Euroblogs should reach out more across the language barrier and across national blogosphere barriers – there function should probably be information collectors and connectors across the different blogs, putting the stories, news, and arguments they make in context. This would help support specialist Euroblogs and encourage people to write such blogs. Of course, that’s a very idealist view of how a more mature Euroblogosphere would work, and placing the words “blogger” and “should” in the same sentence tends to render them oxymoronic… But generally Eurobloggers tend to be public spirited (probably one of the effects of being geeky enough to write about the EU is wanting others to join in to popularise your subject), so talk of “Euroblogging strategy” might have some affect.

I have to admit that I’m one of the worst Eurobloggers when it comes to building bridges. My mini-series on Northern Irish MEPs was picked up by one or two Eurobloggers (and kindly put on the Bloggingportal front page), but I suspect that was because it fit in with the idealised view of “what Eurobloggers should be doing”, rather than the actual content being interesting. As far as I’m aware no Northern Irish or Irish blogs picked up on what I wrote (and I’m only linked to by 2 NI bloggers).

Perhaps I should have tried to publicise my articles in the NI blogosphere? I’d be very uncomfortable with that. It is hard to build up a relationship with NI bloggers because their blogosphere is necessarily restricted in topic to regional concerns, and EU politics rarely intersects (though it does occasionaly with CAP politics).

I suppose I should start commenting more widely, using Google Translate and lurking in more national/regional blogs. The problem for me is the amount of time that takes!

The noise-signal thing is just my own personal bugbear. Large groups of people are supposed to make a lot of “meaningless” noise! Perhaps it’s a community-approach versus an individualist-approach (or perhaps I’m just misunderstanding the noise-signal concept).

Anyway, this really is off-topic. I hope I get round to posting on this properly.

Is it too much to ask that you read the two posts I’ve written on this particular topic first? ;-P

You’ll find that I’m not saying anything like what you write I am saying. Both posts were in fact reactions to the problems of eurosceptics lowering the quality of online conversation – Godwin’s law in action.

Neither were at all concerned with whether our posts are findable or not in Google.

Anyway, I want to write a post on “signal-to-noise” at some point. Basically, I’m calling bullshit on the whole concept; it’s too antisocial, too artificial a way of reading information. When you put lots of people in a room together, they are going to make noise. Noise is good – it means people are talking. Even if the group is not talking about your preferred interests (e.g. EU geekery) and instead are talking about how good the Subway they had for lunch was – it’s still not “noise” in any negative sense.

On top of that, a person can now anyway search specifically for conversations they’re interested in. Try a Google search of “Waggener Edstrom Europe” (without the quotation marks) and see what comes up. Two of the top five results are euroblogs – one of them (mine) very critical of their report (the other is your blog). The exact results might vary from person to person (Google now gives you unique results based on your search history) but we’ve still created enough of a buzz that our results will be up there.

The audience that actually follows the euroblogosphere by RSS feed might be relatively small, but we’re putting out posts which people will come across through search engines and links. In the next 10-20 years (as over 50% of the predicted 9 billion humans on Earth go online) it’s going to be hard NOT to find an audience – no matter what you write about there will be a growing interest group.

But in politics, perhaps not. The blogswarm idea is nice, but if the bubble remains very small and very self-referential, the only people reading our posts is ourselves, so it will put as much pressure on the outside world as … well, a soap bubble.

Of course, the bubble does seem to be expanding a little right now. We’ve had false dawns before, but I remain hopeful.

As for BloggingPortal – it’s doing a good job. It would be an overstatement to say that its home page has nothing else than the Usual Suspects, voting for each other and discussing the future of BloggingPortal! I’m just rather impatient – I’ve been working with Web2 and the EU since 2002, after all, and back then assumed things would have evolved slightly further by now.

PS Ralf has also picked up on this – I just added a comment over here.